Grants propel summer research projects

Every summer, a group of researchers are selected for Dean’s Summer Research grants. These funds allow professors to use the summer months to dig into new work or bear down on a large project.

Every summer, a group of researchers are selected for Dean’s Summer Research Grants. These funds allow professors to use the summer months to dig into new work or bear down on a large project. “These grants are intended to accelerate faculty research agendas,” explained Raghu Santanam, chairman of the Department of Information Systems. “Summer is also the time to reflect on programs and curriculum innovations.

We selectively fund faculty over the summer to continuously improve our programs and enhance our reputation as the leading research department in the information systems field.” KnowIT interviewed this year’s recipients — Assistant Professor Gregory Dawson, Professor Bin Gu and Associate Professor Benjamin Shao — about this summer’s work. Watch KnowIT in the coming year for full reports on these projects as they come to fruition.

Gregory Dawson: Innovation in the federal government

The old saying goes that government is inefficient and ineffective, and should be run like a business. But government can be innovative, as Assistant Professor Gregory Dawson knows. Dawson’s research has delved deeply into the anatomy of state government technology innovation, resulting in a number of practitioner and scholarly articles.

This summer he shifted his focus to the federal government. What he learned will eventually become a technology innovation playbook to help federal employees move more of their ideas into practice. His co-investigators are Kevin C. Desouza from ASU’s School of Public Affairs and James S. Denford from the Royal Military College of Canada. At the state level, Dawson said, the CIO and the state legislature work together closely. Legislatures identify priorities — such as eradicating poverty or improving education — and the CIO leads the technology response. Interestingly, governors don’t have much of a role. The federal government stands the process on its head.

Innovation bubbles up from the people doing the work rather than coming down from the top. One source of innovative energy is the professionals themselves. “Federal field personnel, who have huge responsibility for getting work done, often realize that if only we did this, we could get the job done better, faster, cheaper,” Dawson said. In fact, 98 percent of the operational innovations come from the worker level. A second source of change is the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program, inaugurated three years ago by President Obama. The PIFs are “real tech studs,” as Dawson describes them, who work in the government on 18-month appointments to look for opportunities for strategic improvement. “One PIF likened his role to the grain of sand in an oyster shell,” he added. “He told me he has to go in and be an irritant to the organiz ation and force it to respond.”

Last, like their peers at the state level, federal government CIOs generate tactical innovations. Dawson says that the infamous federal bureaucracy often stymies innovation, but there have been “shining stars” of successful change. His research is designed to map the path those innovators followed, so that others can make their ideas real as well. The research will produce a report for the IBM Business of Government initiative, an article for California Management Review and a more technical piece for one of the top IS journals. When asked why he decided to focus on government as his research target, Dawson points out that 49.2 percent of U.S. citizens receive direct government aid every year, and successful delivery depends in part on effective technology. Studying government operations allows him to fulfill his part of the ASU vision statement: pursuing research and discovery that benefits the public good and contributes to the well-being of the community.

Bin Gu: How does leadership change impact performance?

Professor Bin Gu’s long fascination with social networks took a turn this summer. He has studied online social networks extensively, but in the past couple months he embarked on a close look at off-line networks — the way people connect and move around in their careers — and the impact those social networks might have on company performance. Gu is working with a database that, among other things, tracks the career moves of senior executives over a four to six year period based on the results of a survey.

The end goal is to learn something about the impact of these leadership shifts on the effectiveness of IT in their organizations. “In IT research we find that the effectiveness of IT investments varies dramatically from firm to firm,” Gu said. 'Company A' may realize $10 million in benefits from a $1 million tech investment, while 'Company B' might see none. So, what happens when a senior executive from 'Company A' moves to 'Company B?' Or reverse the transition: will 'Company A' experience any impact if an executive from 'Company B' joins their team? “We want to see to what degree there is spillover when executives move from firm to firm,” Gu said. Do executives from the high performing companies have attributes that will help low performing companies? When executives move to better companies, do they learn? Gu and his co-authors also plan to look at the data from a network perspective.

Several of the senior executives tracked are connected, because they work in similar organizations or perhaps worked together in the past. “If we go beyond the dyad, what will we see?” Gu asked. This summer, the team obtained the data, cleaned it and began formulating questions. It’s a special time in any research project. “It’s exciting because we don’t know what we’ll find or how it will all come out,” he said.

Benjamin Shao: Performance of the technology services industry

Traditionally, the economy is divided into three sectors: services, manufacturing and agriculture. IT services by its nature falls into the broader services sector, which is not known for productivity gains or innovation adoption. But Associate Professor Benjamin Shao wondered if the sluggishness of the sector as a whole masked the true performance of the IT services industry. Shao worked with Professor Winston T. Lin of the State University of New York at Buffalo, looking at 12 years of data from a dozen member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The pair determined the productivity of each county’s IT services industries, their level of innovation and how successful lagging ones were in catching up.

Shao and his collaborator found that IT services industries increased productivity at an annual average rate of 7.4 percent over the 12 years — an impressive gain compared to the rest of the services sector, which largely showed small or even negative productivity gains during the same time period studied. This came as no real surprise to Shao, who pointed out that IT services are fundamentally different: they are knowledge-based, use information technology and are innovation-driven. Most of the gains in the IT services industry could be traced to innovation in the form of technological advance.

The data also revealed that in the IT services sector, companies lead, or risk failure. Once behind, the chances of catching up are nil. “If your industry is very stable in terms of technology, such as construction or trucking, the laggard can try to catch up with the best performers through efficiency improvements,” Shao explained. “But in the case of IT services, we find out that it’s very hard for the laggards to catch up because technology advances so quickly. Even when you inch closer, the leaders are pushing the frontier even farther out. You’re lucky if you can keep the gap the same. More likely it’s widening, and you spend all your time looking at the leaders’ back and eating their dust, so to speak.” The message for IT service companies, Shao said, is to keep innovating. “You simply cannot afford to be complacent.”